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Simon Davison - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Revolution Phones Ltd
Reseller
Geoblocking resulted in immediate, obvious reduction in the amount of spam being quarantined
Pros and Cons
  • "If all you have is a solution that looks at every piece of email and applies the same types of rules, you don't get a very smart solution. Whereas, if you can do it per mailbox or per domain, like you can with SpamTitan, that means you are effectively able to configure it almost per-user, which is great."
  • "False positives may be an area for improvement. It's very rare that we see false negatives, but false positives might be an area where I, myself, could put some more effort into looking at the settings... Perhaps that's something in the user interface that isn't hugely clear."

What is our primary use case?

We have it in front of Microsoft 365 for spam filtering.

How has it helped my organization?

SpamTitan's geo-blocking feature is very exciting. On my old server, we spent quite a lot of time building countrywide address blocks. Now, that is completely redundant with the geoblocking. To be fair, it's not just SpamTitan that does it. I see it in lots of places. We do that regularly on firewalls.

But if we're building a new system for people, we'll say, "Do you communicate with any high-risk countries?" If they say, "Yeah, probably. What are the high-risk countries?" we can say, "We have a list of what we considered high-risk, and we can block all of those in one tick." They will say, "Yeah, please, because we get a lot of spam from various countries." That's great. And I presume that it's updated fairly regularly.

When we implemented the geoblocking, it made an immediate and obvious difference to the amount of spam that was being quarantined. It reduced the amount of spam by more than 50 percent.

Doing geoblocking by IP is hard work. It's possible, but the nature of spam is that it's sent out by the spammers using botnets and VPNs to cover their tracks. There's a lot of to-and-fro in the war against spam, but knocking out a whole dodgy country is very good.

Also, when we talk to our customers about cyber security and they mention they have spam and viruses coming in through their email, we can tell them what we can do to help resolve that. We would then look with them at either the time savings or the cost savings, versus the investment they'd have to make in the SpamTitan licensing and say, "When you look at the benefits, they are going to be much greater than the costs. Why would you not do it?"

And once customers have that kind of focus when looking at the issue, they'll make a choice and they'll stick with it. They'll probably have it in place for years because it becomes "a part of the furniture." They take it as a given that they've got protection. They're happy with what it's doing. It's removing swaths of malware and nuisance emails and they're happy that it works.

When looking at our own organization, it used to be the case that people would be looking at their inboxes every day and clearing out junk. They could potentially spend an average of about 15 minutes doing that at the beginning of a day, and perhaps have a few more goes at tidying things up through the day. Before we were using SpamTitan, every person in our company would be losing half an hour or more, every day, just de-junking their inboxes. To take that down, now, to a matter of seconds through a quick scan of the quarantine or a report is really great.

And overall, it has definitely improved our spam catch rate.

What is most valuable?

One of the most valuable features is the opportunity to quarantine things. In addition, the option to have somebody manage the quarantine on behalf of users, or to let the system send out daily reports so that users can manage things on their own, are both very straightforward.

Slightly larger customers in particular have different requirements from those at the very small end. For the larger ones, applying global rules is difficult because, even within one organization, there are many teams, such as sales at one end and accounts at the other end. That means that the types of emails that each team is processing can be very different. If all you have is a solution that looks at every piece of email and applies the same types of rules, you don't get a very smart solution. Whereas, if you can do it per mailbox or per domain, like you can with SpamTitan, that means you are effectively able to configure it almost per-user, which is great.

The user interface is fine. It's fairly quick. Sometimes it's a little bit slow in loading a quarantine list, but it's nothing that's too painful or a problem. The user interface is very workable. In terms of the solution's intuitiveness, it all makes sense.

What needs improvement?

I have noticed that TitanHQ adds new features quite frequently. If I have one little feature request, it would be that they shout a little bit more about the new features they're adding. I haven't blocked them from sending me marketing emails and I wouldn't be averse to having more of them, particularly for the new features. That's really important because it gives us an opportunity to go to customers and prospects and say, "Look, this is our preferred product, and here is what they've just brought out now."

Also, false positives may be an area for improvement. It's very rare that we see false negatives, but false positives might be an area where I, myself, could put some more effort into looking at the settings. There are various settings that could probably be optimized. Perhaps that's something in the user interface that isn't hugely clear. There is a spam score threshold through which you can reject spam when an item has greater score than the setting. I wouldn't call it counterintuitive, but it takes a little bit of thought. Having set it up, it works very well, so I am happy with it.

Finally, a minor point is that I looked at another system that had the ability to deliver to multiple inbound servers, which is something I don't think SpamTitan does, although I haven't followed up by going back to my own installation of SpamTitan to see if could I set that up there. But it's not a big deal. Most people are not going to be doing really complicated things like having multiple inbound mail servers with completely different addresses.

Buyer's Guide
TitanHQ SpamTitan
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about TitanHQ SpamTitan. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for more than three years. We initially bought a three-year package and that was renewed a few months ago.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is fine. I don't think I've ever seen an outage of any sort.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I can't see that there would be an issue when it comes to scalability. If the software is managing millions of transactions a day, it's not going to make very much difference if you go from two million to three million a day. I would imagine it is highly scalable.

How are customer service and support?

We've had very little need to talk to tech support. That says it all. I'm very satisfied with how the support works.

But for partners like us, it's the ease of access to the company that is one of the key differentiators. I'm not sure of the size of TitanHQ in comparison to some of the others, but I'm a great believer in working with SME providers. Quite often, we find that the smaller providers are much more nimble in their relations with their partners and also with their development roots. Some of the huge companies are lumbering, clumsy organizations. While it's not that I'm on a first-name basis with all of the people in TitanHQ, because that's far from the truth, the relationship with them is a lot closer than, say, the relationship with Microsoft, which is a company that it's never easy to get close to.

To be fair and realistic about it, this is just one of the solutions that we have in our portfolio. Potentially, we could put more effort into looking at the marketing resources TitanHQ have. That connects back to what I said before, that I wouldn't object to having a bit more of a push from their side regarding new features and marketing initiatives. That would prompt me to take opportunities actively, as opposed to reactively from customers when they say, "What do we do about spam?"

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We originally went with Microsoft’s built-in spam filtering but decided it was rubbish. We looked around for a better solution and chose SpamTitan.

Microsoft 365 is stable but it's just inadequate. It has typical, crazy Microsoft logic behind it, whereas SpamTitan looks like something that has been developed by people who understand the problem they needed to solve. Its basic technology is very much better than Microsoft's.

How was the initial setup?

SpamTitan was very easy when it came to the setup and configuration and it's easy to use. It would make it an uphill struggle if it was difficult to configure. We do get situations with other products where "difficult to install" can actually be a complete showstopper. That does not apply to SpamTitan. It's very easy to install.

For example, I have a customer that has changed their order processing software three times during the relationship over many years. While the latest one that they have, which looks very slick and modern on the face of it, the installation process is absolutely horrible. Even to do things like configuring multiple users on one PC with this particular software, requires a complete, messy uninstall, registry edits, and then a reinstall for a different user. It will not accept having multiple configurations on one PC.

When I compare that with SpamTitan, which, of course, is not working at the PC level but at the network level, that problem is never going to occur. The ease of installation and use is important. If that long-standing customer came to me and said, "We're thinking of changing again. What are the top-three things to look out for?" I would tell them, "Well, this messy installation that you have on the current one is a showstopper because it takes so much time for our team to configure it, and that costs you money."

The closer it gets to plug-and-play, the better.

With SpamTitan, the deployment was trivial. It was very quick. Going from the starting point, where you've got Outlook on a PC talking to Microsoft 365 with nothing between them, through to having SpamTitan in between the two, took minutes. And that's only done once per organization. The benefits of SpamTitan can be seen as soon as you can measure them. It's not something that takes an awful long time to get up to speed. It just works, straight out-of-the-box.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's a very good product and the pricing and licensing are exceptionally reasonable. TitanHQ's partner program is fine when it comes to partner profitability.

I do potentially have a question about the pricing policy. It works on the basis of billing per mailbox. I thought, "Oh, that's a bit weird," when I first looked into it. On a Microsoft setup—almost everybody we deal with has Microsoft 365—you can have a lot of aliases. In a very small company that has a dozen users, they'll have a dozen mailboxes, but they may have 50 aliases. The SpamTitan product looks at those aliases as individual mailboxes. At the end of the day, that doesn't really matter, because you can count what is the unit of measurement that you're going to use, whether it is a person, a domain, a mailbox, or everything that could be an email address. I don't mind, it works. It's just, perhaps, a slightly quirky way of doing it.

Also, when I did a couple of renewals recently, the salesperson who was talking to me might not have been quite up to speed with the products and the pricing. It took me a few goes, sending emails forwards and back, to actually get an order placed and to get confirmation of the price that we had negotiated. At the end of the day it worked, so it wasn't a problem.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Back in the day, I used to run my own mail servers using Mercury Mail Servers. That was effectively an open-source package which was very straightforward and very manageable. It also had 30 third-party bolt-ons, one of which was a Bayesian spam filtering tool. It would learn on the basis of the training that you gave it, which at the time, I thought, was very clever. These days, there is a lot of spam filtering that is not all that clever. There seem to be quite a few holes in it. But when I did an evaluation of SpamTitan I thought, "Yeah, this is exactly what we want. It has everything." It has filtering, quarantine, blacklisting, and malware protection.

What other advice do I have?

It’s good to be a partner of TitanHQ so that we have something in our portfolio that we can offer to people. However, there's a lot of resistance out there, particularly at the SME end of the market. When we start a discussion about how they do their malware and spam filtering, a lot of people say, "Well, it's all built into Microsoft." We might then get into a discussion along the lines of, “Yeah, it's built into Microsoft, but it's not very good. And it doesn't seem to be getting any better as time goes by, and it's very awkward to use.” Yet, quite often, we run into people who say, "We don't want to pay for an add-on when we think that it can be done with other software packages." This is our challenge when we go to prospects, or to existing customers when we're discussing upselling to them: There is still quite a lot of resistance. It's just one of those things that we have to work to overcome.

My advice would be to come to our office and we'll show it to you in action. We can show you the stats and how easy it is to add things to whitelists and blacklists and  to adjust the parameters. We can show you all these cool features it has.

Using geoblocking for allowing exemptions based on a trusted sender's IP domain or email address is okay, although we haven't done much of that yet. I can envisage situations where potentially we could, but there are cases where I have a bit of a dilemma as to whether to block or whether to not block. China is a good example of that. We could do without getting an awful lot of the stuff that we get from China. But equally, one of our biggest customers is a global manufacturing business and they have a presence in China. I can't really say to them, "Hey, why don't you block China?"

We can always take the position of blocking or not blocking on a per-country basis. And then, if we've blocked and shouldn't have, we can just set up some exceptions and probably come up with the right solution. There's work to be done but that's true of a lot of aspects of cyber security. You've got to put effort into it and you've got to keep updating what you're doing with it.

I've yet to find anybody who would come to us simply on the basis that we provide SpamTitan, but it's definitely a very good value-added tool. For in-house use it's almost invaluable because it goes back to the fundamentals of how you do spam filtering and defense.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Reseller/Partner
PeerSpot user
Rafik Kattoum - PeerSpot reviewer
Infra manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Users can access their quarantines and decide to whitelist, block, or blacklist emails, which frees up our service desk team
Pros and Cons
  • "The standout features include the anti-phishing feature, which is particularly advantageous as far as our clients are concerned; it was a very welcome addition for many of them."
  • "The quarantine report frequency could be better."

What is our primary use case?

We're an MSP providing IT services and we host mail servers in Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

We host SpamTitan behind a firewall, and the SpamTitan appliances talk to a first load balancer. The load balancer directs the traffic to our mail servers which are still in the DMZ. After the Edge servers, they redirect the mail flow to our internal firewalls. From these firewalls, we go to another load balancer and the backend infrastructure, where we have our mailboxes.

How has it helped my organization?

As a SpamTitan MSP, several aspects of TitanHQ's technology help us acquire new customers and add value to our services and product offerings. These include the anti-spam efficiency, the efficiency of the antivirus engine included in the product, and the self-service user quarantine. Since deploying the tool, we have had almost no viruses, and the malware detection is excellent. 

TitanHQ works hard to provide the best service, which can be challenging as client service is an art, but they have made many improvements recently. They're always seeking client feedback regarding support services, which we appreciate. They're constantly developing new features, some become premium, and some they offer for free, such as anti-phishing features. TitanHQ recently developed a new feature called Link Lock, which our clients appreciated and even convinced some prospective clients to join, as that's a selling point for us as an anti-spam product.    

The most significant benefit of being a TitanHQ partner is that they care about how they provide:

  • Services.
  • The efficiency of their services.
  • The quality of the client experience.

In terms of real, tangible benefits for our clients, by upgrading to SpamTitan, we were able to reverse the trend of dissatisfaction in our customer base. It changed the quality of our services for the better.   

SpamTitan spares a significant amount of employee time and effort by not having to sort through spam and junk emails. The end-user quarantine mailbox and the self-service portal offered to every end-user through a web portal are convenient and time-saving features. Users can access their quarantines and decide to whitelist, block, or blacklist emails, which frees up our service desk team. The time we spend going through junk and spam emails dramatically decreased by around 40-50% compared to our old solution, and our service desk team is now happy with our infrastructure services. It used to be a nightmare with our old provider. 

We've also seen a dramatic improvement in our spam catch rate and a reduction in false positives since implementing SpamTitan. Our clients' main criticism of us was the lack of flexibility in the previous anti-spam solution we used. Now we have flexibility, transparency, and efficiency, which all matter to our clients and us.

What is most valuable?

All the features are valuable; mail security isn't about one feature but rather a collection of features. The good thing about SpamTitan is its versatility because it offers every feature we need. They're not always easy to implement, but we have access to the entire suite required by an MSP like us to provide the best service possible to our clients. We appreciate that, and everything we could wish for regarding email security is included in the product.

The standout features include the anti-phishing feature, which is particularly advantageous as far as our clients are concerned; it was a very welcome addition for many of them. 

The ability to do mail sandboxing before delivering and receiving emails for antivirus and anti-malware detection is excellent.

The double antivirus and anti-malware engine utilizing Clam AntiVirus and Bitdefender, plus all the standard security processes, including anti-spoofing detection, DKIM, and business email compromise (BEC) features, make for a robust security profile. We appreciate these features, and they all work very well.

What needs improvement?

The quarantine report frequency could be better. 

Sometimes we have specific concerns and requests for TitanHQ that their product can't currently cater to because it's not designed for it. We are often told this will be included in the roadmap. Still, we need visibility on when it will be deployed, when a requested feature will become available, or even tested. More transparency on this front would be a big plus.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using SpamTitan for a little over three years. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable and reliable; we never had an issue regarding operational stability and service access. We only had third-party issues or problems related to our infrastructure services.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable; we run it as a virtual machine, so we have the associated flexibility. As long as we pay for them, we can add as many nodes as we need. We never had to worry about scaling the product.

We currently have around 1,500 end users. 

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is responsive and client-oriented; they care about the client. They listen to client complaints and continually work to improve their services, so we are very satisfied. The support isn't ideal or perfect, and in some cases, we weren't completely satisfied, but TitanHQ always tries to do better based on our feedback.

Comparing SpamTitan's customer support team versus our previous solution, it's night and day, which is one of the reasons we switched to them. SpamTitan changed our lives as an MSP in terms of mail security.  

When we open tickets with them, we know they will help us in a timely and efficient way, which gives us peace of mind. This wasn't the case with our previous solution; we always chased technicians for a working solution and feedback. With TitanHQ, it's the other way around; they chase us for feedback, and they're concerned with the quality and relevance of their support. They care about the client experience, and that's great.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used Broadcom SMG and switched because we were unsatisfied with the product. We had a lot of false positives and spam getting through, so we wanted to improve our situation significantly. We met with a SpamTitan sales team, who were very convincing. We agreed that we needed their product and implemented the on-prem solution.

How was the initial setup?

As I'm the Infrastructure Manager, I was involved in the deployment, and we were surprised by how easy the deployment was. TitanHQ has a very well-done online wiki, which made the setup elementary. The initial deployment took a few days, and the most challenging part was to cut over from our old solution without impacting our clients and end users. Aside from that, the deployment was a breeze.

We finalized the agreement on the licensing, downloaded the SpamTitan images as we were running VMware as a hypervisor, deployed the images, made the network configurations, and double-checked that they were correctly done. We then started testing the mail flow, and when this was conclusive, we started the client migration. I carried out the deployment alone for the most part, with one other employee to double-check the setup, which is our company policy for deploying a new product.

The only maintenance required is part of a lifecycle management process we have as a company, in which we're required to check for obsolete hardware and software revisions regularly. SpamTitan is no exception, and it's very straightforward; we check if there's a software update available through a GUI, and if there is, we take a snapshot as we're running a virtual machine. We back up with our backup solution as an additional safety layer and go through the upgrade; it's an ideal process.

What was our ROI?

We have a considerable ROI; we lost clients with our previous tool, whereas now we have expanded our client base and are getting prospective clients because we have a reliable solution.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price is quite advantageous; we were initially surprised at the pricing compared to other solutions, which made us doubt if this was the solution for us. Then, we discovered SpamTitan's features and how cost-effective it is. The sales team does an excellent job making our life easier in terms of pricing, which is another significant advantage of this product.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated MailCleaner and a more expensive solution, Cisco Secure Email, which we didn't find cost-effective. We made a product comparison and decided to go with SpamTitan, and we don't regret our choice.

What other advice do I have?

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

TitanHQ's key differentiator for its partners is the level of support services; they're fast, responsive, efficient, and care about client satisfaction. That's the main differentiator, plus the fact that their product is constantly evolving with new features.   

We don't use the solution's geo-blocking feature because we are not convinced by IP-based blocking instead of location-based. We know geolocation based on a GPS location is challenging, and very few providers offer it, but the current state of IP-based geolocation features is not a requirement for us or our client base.

TitanHQ needs to continue surveying us for client satisfaction regarding their support services, as that's important to us. We appreciate it when they send us emails from time to time asking about our opinion or satisfaction. We also appreciate how they get back to us when a new feature becomes available that could help us improve our services, so we want them to keep this up.

My advice to others evaluating SpamTitan is to refer to the excellent wiki hosted on the solution's website or contact the amazing, client-focused L2 and L3 staff, who are happy to answer any query.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
TitanHQ SpamTitan
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about TitanHQ SpamTitan. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.
IT Consultant at Arcadia Ambulance
Reseller
Prevents spam from coming in and makes it easy to whitelist email
Pros and Cons
  • "The digest and the quarantine are the most valuable features. I can go into the quarantine and see everything that was quarantined. On an individual basis, you can easily whitelist an email or address coming in, if needed."
  • "The stability of SpamTitan is equivalent to other email security solutions that I have previously used. Some of them have more bells and whistles that you can add. For example, inside the email subject line, you can put in the words encrypt secret, or secure. Then, it will automatically secure that email and send an email to the person who is supposed to receive it. They can identify it for themselves in a series of different Q&A questions. That is sometimes a deciding factor for clients."

What is our primary use case?

It allows me to help my clients prevent bad stuff coming onto their network. It does security spam filtering, searching where it came from and whether it is spam or whatever. It also scans attachments, URLs, and addresses in the emails, then puts it in a quarantine. It is part of the tools in my suitcase of things which can help my client keep their network clean.

We are using it at Arcadia Ambulance. Other clients that I have use it as well. Further usage is definitely on the horizon, as needed. It really depends on who wants to use it. Pricing can be a decider.

How has it helped my organization?

It provides insurance for cybersecurity, which is required for a lot of clients. There is peace of mind, knowing that their network will be a bit more secure.

What is most valuable?

Sometimes, sources considered spam try to attack the client who has put in a filter. I don't know what they are trying to do, as they might be violating SPF records or attempting DMARC DNS violations. This solution prevents that spam from coming in. The client can then see that in their digest on a daily basis.

The digest and the quarantine are the most valuable features. I can go into the quarantine and see everything that was quarantined. On an individual basis, you can easily whitelist an email or address coming in, if needed.

The user interface experience is easy and intuitive. I don't think I have ever run into a situation where I don't know how to do something or don't know where something is at, then calling up someone at SpamTitan. The product is a little more powerful and user-friendly now at Arcadia Ambulance, then when I used it as Arcadia Ambulance. 

SpamTitan is easy to navigate. It is in a format that the end user can understand. I don't really need to handhold clients who are using it. They understand it is very intuitive. If an email comes in, and they don't want that to come in, then they can block the email as an email that they don't want to receive. It is fairly easy for them to navigate and manage the spam filter service.

What needs improvement?

I am not sure it does URL filtering or checks for phishing, but if it does, then great. That would probably be my room for improvement. I would like it to check for DCIN violations from locations where the email is being sent. Also, I would like it to do sandboxing, e.g., if an attachment is on an email, then it opens that at a different location to ensure that file attachment does not have any malicious aspects to it.

There is some room for improvement. Some of the biggest ones are better scanning of emails coming from what source and scanning emails for the content in the email. For example, determining if the email has malicious content in it by scanning the email and attachment. If it does that, then great, but that is very important to my clients and me. It is very important that you know what is in an email before it gets into an office's location. Not only where it is coming from, but what is in it, which is probably more important than where it is coming from. It could be coming from a client's partner or a business that they work with, but what if they get compromised? The perpetrators or bad guys start sending emails to Arcadia Ambulance, and they are infected with scripts and bad stuff. They think, "Okay, this is a legit user," since they get emails from them all the time, then they get hit. That is how a lot of really bad stuff happens.

The stability of SpamTitan is equivalent to other email security solutions that I have previously used. Some of them have more bells and whistles that you can add. For example, inside the email subject line, you can put in the words encrypt secret, or secure. Then, it will automatically secure that email and send an email to the person who is supposed to receive it. They can identify it for themselves in a series of different Q&A questions. That is sometimes a deciding factor for clients.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it in the past, quite a bit, at another company where the solution was sold. I was reselling it indirectly through another distributor and TitanHQ was hosting it on their server. That was different because Arcadia Ambulance is using it directly through TitanHQ.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It just gets it done. It could probably be improved with more options being provided. For example, being able to hold emails that come in for up to 30 days, so if an email is lost or whatever, you can go and read it again. Seeing emails for each individual is a feature that could be provided for both incoming and outgoing, almost like a cached copy of every email coming in and out.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There are 10 to 15 users using this solution. This includes finance, management, payroll, billing, and the assistance department. The assistance department assists in routing patients to their ambulance, e.g., where they will be picked up. They also address any issues that might come up, such as how long it will take the driver to arrive. It looks at traffic patterns and helps the ambulance get there, if they need help.

How are customer service and support?

TitanHQ technical support is knowledgeable, but sometimes not accessible because they are a UK company. Sometimes when I need help, they might not be available to help me. I would rate them as eight out of 10.

The expertise, attentiveness, and speed of response from TitanHQ’s customer support team is pretty good compared to competing solutions’ customer support teams. It is equivalent.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Arcadia Ambulance previously didn't have anything. Therefore, when it came time to update their cybersecurity insurance, we helped implement SpamTitan, which met all the requirements. Before, it would sometimes go into the junk folder inside of Outlook.

How was the initial setup?

It wasn't too difficult to set up and configure SpamTitan. I had to change the DNS, then configure and enable it for all the end users who would be using it. That wasn't very difficult at all. I actually did it by myself, then I had a conference call with a tech support person who double checked my settings and that my configuration was done correctly. So, it was fairly easy. It took about one or two hours.

I did have to talk to my boss at Arcadia and answer a few questions. Believe it or not, my email address was blocked so he had to unblock it.

What was our ROI?

I can make a lot of money reselling it. 

Partner profitability is good with Titan HQ's partner program. This means that I recommend it to clients who trust me. My time and effort to educate them is compensated by TitanHQ, who provides the solution to me at a lower price than what the public gets it at, then I can make some money.

My business is more secure. In which case, I am up all the time. I have fewer vulnerabilities, which is important. That is my return on investment for getting SpamTitan's spam filter. If I don't have it, then I could have large bills for resolving and correcting the damage that was done.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I just say, "The pricing is X amount per month and per mailbox."

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

TitanHQ is all over the world, and not all solutions are global. TitanHQ sees what is happening globally, adding to their experience and knowledge.

What other advice do I have?

SpamTitan has helped improve my spam catch rate and reduce my false positive rate amongst the services that I use. For example, I use a firewall and most clients scan files, attachments, and data coming in and out. I don't use just one solution, but many different ones, so there is overlap.

I tell someone looking into this solution that it has a series of different security functions or features, then I inform them of other options out there.

Don't always assume that it does what you think it does. Clarify and ask questions. Ask if it can do other things besides the things that it currently does.

I would rate the solution as seven and a half out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP and Reseller.
PeerSpot user
Ryan Shepherd - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Real User
Intuitive integration of DKIM signing in a highly flexible and customizable solution, with outstanding support
Pros and Cons
  • "I like that advanced features such as DKIM signing are integrated into SpamTitan. It works well, and setting up DKIM can be cumbersome for many email servers, particularly with Microsoft Exchange. DKIM signing verifies the sender's authenticity by applying a signature to outgoing emails, and it was straightforward to set up within the solution."
  • "There is room for improvement in automation; better wizards for deployment, for example."

What is our primary use case?

We are a managed service provider, and many of our customers have email on-premises with Microsoft Exchange Servers or through cloud-based services like Microsoft 365. They weren't satisfied with built-in spam filtering, received too many spam emails, and suffered from phishing attacks etc. This highlighted the need for a robust anti-spam solution for us to roll out for our clients, and we decided to go with TitanHQ SpamTitan. We've had a good relationship since then, and they cloud host our instance of SpamTitan; it's otherwise managed by us internally.

How has it helped my organization?

I don't think that's sort of in the scope of this type of product. So no, I don't think it really applies.

What is most valuable?

I like that advanced features such as DKIM signing are integrated into SpamTitan. It works well, and setting up DKIM can be cumbersome for many email servers, particularly with Microsoft Exchange. DKIM signing verifies the sender's authenticity by applying a signature to outgoing emails, and it was straightforward to set up within the solution.

TitanHQ support is very helpful and responsive. When we wanted to make changes, needed assistance customizing the solution, or had any concerns, they are there for us, and that's a key feature.

When clients approach us looking for tech services, we put together a proposal to address their needs, and if those include email security and anti-spam, we pitch SpamTitan. The price is per user, and we set up the solution in front of the client's email service. The product filters all incoming and potentially outgoing emails, allowing only the clean ones through. 

We appreciate how customizable and flexible the solution is. It allows us to operate how we want, especially as we have our own instance. We have two of them in a cluster for redundancy, and we can go in and make whatever changes we require with no problems. 

We have a good partner relationship with our TitanHQ sales rep. They are very responsive in terms of support; our concerns are taken seriously and resolved appropriately. We are an SMB and work primarily with other SMBs, so vendor relationships and trust are essential to us. When partnered with a gigantic company, there is a risk of our voice going unheard when we have complaints, which hasn't happened with TitanHQ. 

Regarding filtering emails, we have two main requirements: reducing the spam cluttering users' inboxes and, more importantly, filtering out malicious emails containing viruses, malware, phishing attacks, etc. The product has done a great job filtering those out, and when it comes to security, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The consequences of a malicious email getting through are potentially very severe, and the system could be compromised. 

It can be hard to quantify as users aren't even aware of the viruses, malware, and phishing emails SpamTitan rejects before reaching their mailboxes. I'm sure it's saving employees' time, as just one malicious email can cost a significant amount of productivity. If someone's account is compromised, even if there are no other adverse effects, we still need to reset their credentials and multi-factor authentication. The more significant concern of an account being compromised is data leakage; if a bad actor got in and saw our emails, what sort of information can they glean from that, and how can they use it? We saw cases before we started to use SpamTitan, or in our clients who don't use the product, where malicious actors got in and were able to run financial scams because they could get into the emails and see invoices being sent to customers. Preventing these situations is one of the key selling points of the solution, and it has increased our spam catch rate and reduced the number of false positives. 

What needs improvement?

The authentication functionality could be improved. We liked having a single sign-on approach in that our customers could use the same username and password for their workstation, email, and spam filter. That integrates very well in an on-premise environment. Microsoft has since moved away from some of its legacy authentication methods, so it's no longer possible for our clients to use the exact login details for SpamTitan and Microsoft 365. SpamTitan has yet to introduce modern authentication methods. Although we can use the solution's native multi-factor authentication, it isn't compatible with Microsoft 365's MFA, requiring the use of different usernames and passwords. It would be great if TitanHQ could improve that to be compatible with modern authentication. 

There is room for improvement in automation; better wizards for deployment, for example.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using the solution since April 2019, and we've filtered over 20 million emails for our customers.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We've had one major outage since 2019, where one of our nodes was taken down, and the other was impacted, but not entirely down. We needed support to get up and running, but the solution is 100% stable apart from that occasion. It's not perfect, but no cloud service is, and I would say that one issue over three years of use makes SpamTitan a highly reliable product.

I'd say the stability is comparable with other solutions. When we were with Roaring Penguin, there were one or two outages over a similar period. No product is up 100% of the time. When cloud services go down, we feel it because there isn't anything we can do, but SpamTitan has very high uptime, and I think most cloud services have very high uptimes.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We haven't had any scalability issues; our two nodes have handled all the traffic we're throwing at it, so we haven't had to scale beyond our initial deployment. TitanHQ manages that for us, and we don't have to pay any mind to scale resources in terms of CPU and RAM. At one point, they may have increased logging disk space. Other than that, there has been no need to scale.

How are customer service and support?

I rate them a 10 out of 10. The support isn't 24/7, so tickets submitted on the weekend may not be answered until Monday, and there is a time difference as they are based in Ireland. We brought this up with our rep, and they gave us a direct line to get support from a technician in urgent scenarios. We used that once and woke the technician up on the other end. TitanHQ always adequately addressed our concerns; they took the step to make up for the issues we raised about the availability of technical support, which is very valuable. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We have a large customer base, so we inherit the different solutions that come with them; that's a lot of different products. We had clients using Microsoft 365's built-in spam filter, GFI MailEssentials, and other on-premise solutions, so we became familiar with these products. As an MSP, we don't necessarily dictate our customers' solutions. We provided firewalls with email filters from a vendor called eSoft, then acquired by Untangle, and an anti-spam solution by Roaring Penguin Software. They were purchased by N-able, which shut down the service and pushed for our clients to move to Mail Assure. We were satisfied with Roaring Penguin and didn't like Mail Assure, which triggered our search for a new solution to offer our customers. There was also an internal goal to standardize in our company, to focus on one solution.

We chose SpamTitan because it was closer to what we were used to with Roaring Penguin; it was cleaner and more straightforward than the other products. Mail Assure, for example, had a confusing interface, so we went with SpamTitan as our first cloud-hosted solution.

How was the initial setup?

We went with the cloud-hosted solution, so we didn't have to install anything, TitanHQ deployed it for us in the sense that they configured the environment.

In terms of deployment between my company and our customers, it's straightforward. There are just a few steps to add a new customer: adding their domain, adding the point where the mail is going, configuring the settings according to their requirements, and documenting the process. It only took us a few deployments to become very proficient at it. However, some automation, especially in the form of a deployment wizard to assist in setup, would be a welcome improvement.

There is always a tradeoff between feature-rich products and ease of configuration or complexity of setup. I would say SpamTitan is a happy medium, there are a lot of settings and a corresponding learning curve, but the documentation and support are there to make that process smooth. The UI is also user-friendly and straightforward, with little help buttons and question marks to click for more details. Configuration isn't any more difficult than I would expect with a feature-rich, complex product. Especially a spam filtering solution as it's such a cat and mouse game, it's never going to be one-size-fits-all. Our customers have widely differing requirements, so customization is vital. 

The maintenance is very light. The only maintenance requirements are occasional configuration backups and upgrades and version upgrades. Those consist of clicking install, next, and done, so maintenance is simple.

What was our ROI?

Any security solution is generally a good return on investment, whether it's spam filtering, antivirus, firewalls etc. We can't be sure what we have been protected from and what may have happened if we didn't have the protection SpamTitan provides.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing and licensing are acceptable. The licensing is somewhat different; TitanHQ gives us a peak cap of simultaneous users, which they calculate as the number of email addresses viewed through so many days or weeks. That's considered our number of users, but it isn't always a one-to-one relationship, making it harder to resell. We can't say precisely that the solution costs X per month per user, but that's how we present the price to potential customers, and we just ensure we receive more than we pay to TitanHQ. The licensing hasn't caused us any problems, but it would be better if the pricing were per-user. I know that's not easy to achieve on a technical level.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at the N-able Mail Assure solution and a Barracuda spam filtering product. We did the sales calls, received demos, and got quotes for pricing, but the SpamTitan UI won it for us.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

We implemented the geo-blocking feature due to concerns coming out of Ukraine and Russia, so we decided to geo-block emails from that part of the world. Unfortunately, this isn't the product's fault; it didn't work for our customers because they had legitimate vendors or partners in that region. We had to turn the feature off because it interrupted our customers' business. That is not to say geo-blocking isn't a good feature; it just hasn't been compatible with our customers' needs. I can see how this feature could be handy in the future. 

I would advise reading the documentation and reaching out to support if you need any help. They're very helpful.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Assoc. Dean at a university with 51-200 employees
Real User
Cuts down on the amount of noise that end users have to deal with
Pros and Cons
  • "We have had no cases of malware slipping through since we have had SpamTitan."
  • "It could be improved a little bit on the speed side. When I am trying to troubleshoot a mail message that somebody is looking for in SpamTitan, sometimes setting up the filters for the quarantine is a little bit pokey."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for spam. Our biggest concern has been malware. Spam is a nuisance, but malware could be very damaging to our systems, and losing data just wasn't an option for us. It is that security side. The actual spam piece is probably secondary in my mind. Spam was certainly an inconvenience because of user complaints, but filtering out malware was huge for us. I would rather stop these things at the perimeter than rely on a local computer's antivirus.

We use it for exactly what it is supposed to be for. We use it for filtering out any malware that has been sent via email. For your truly obvious spam, I would rather put that out on the edges so end users don't have to see that junk in their junk mailbox. For some reason, being a college, the amount of spam we get is unbelievable. I would rather not overload users with too many things in their junk folders from Outlook. It just cuts down on the amount of noise that end users have to deal with.

We are a college. We are primarily a Windows shop, though we do have some Macs internally. Our servers are Windows-based. We have two locations. However, that whole idea of locations has gotten pretty fuzzy, not only with the cloud, but with the emphasis on remote work. The nice thing is that it filters mail before it even comes into our mail server and it doesn't matter where somebody is. They could be on campus at either one of our locations, or they could be at home, and SpamTitan will do what it is supposed to do.

How has it helped my organization?

It achieves a design goal that we have for in-depth defense.

What is most valuable?

We have had no cases of malware slipping through since we have had SpamTitan.

At times, I have used the geo-blocking feature. There are some hostile countries for whom I try to filter out traffic, be it through email or the perimeter firewall. We have to be careful with it, but it is good for cutting down on the amount of noise that we have to sort through.

The geo-blocking feature has worked well. Certainly some of that stuff can be spoofed, so it is not going to be 100%.For that really spammy spam, a lot of times the spammers don't even try to hide where they are originating from. For that, it has been good. There are a handful of countries that we just consider hostile, so being able to block those has been a good thing.

The geo-blocking feature seems to work fine for allowing exemptions based on a trusted sender's IP, domain, or email address. We haven't had any issues with it.

Over time, you set up additional filters, change the sensitivity level, and set up exceptions. The exceptions are powerful, so we don't accidentally filter out emails from a party that we work with. That has been great. 

What needs improvement?

It could be improved a little bit on the speed side. When I am trying to troubleshoot a mail message that somebody is looking for in SpamTitan, sometimes setting up the filters for the quarantine is a little bit pokey.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using it for 10 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I haven't had to do upgrades. Anything that happens is done by the SpamTitan team, and it just stays up and running.

There have been no concerns in regards to stability. It just works. We haven't experienced any downtime with it. There have been no problems.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We are a small institution, so it certainly meets our needs. For us, it has been fantastic.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support has been great. I haven't needed a lot of technical support, but the few times that I have reached out to them, they have answered quickly. I would rate them as 10 out of 10. 

The biggest thing for me to compare it to would be Microsoft. I much prefer dealing with SpamTitan because they are smaller. They are more responsive than some of the larger companies that we have worked with.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We tried some local things that were local to the computer itself, and typically a part of the anti-malware software. We found the performance hits were unacceptable and the filtering wasn't that good. It didn't satisfy that desire to filter those things out before getting to the user's computer. So, we did use other products, but they just weren't a good option for us.

SpamTitan has been much better than the Exchange Server competing product that we previously used, which would interfere with our backups of the Exchange Server. So, that had to go immediately. We were then depending on endpoint protection, which was just a terrible hit to us from a performance standpoint. Whereas, architecturally, SpamTitan does exactly what we want it to do. It is on the edge of our network, doing its job before anything even comes to our mail server.

SpamTitan was our very first spam filter. We were using an in-house Exchange Server, which didn't have viable filtering. We saw an ad for SpamTitan and brought it in, and it solved our problem. Later on, we did migrate away from an in-house mail service to Microsoft 365. While Microsoft's spam filtering is very good, I am not a big fan of trusting a single technology for something like security. I prefer the defense in-depth approach. 

Now, SpamTitan is more of a perimeter filtering system. What we primarily hope to get from it, and have been getting from it, is filtering out malware sent via email from the most egregious spam. We then let Microsoft be an additional layer after SpamTitan.

SpamTitan has absolutely helped save employees’ time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. We first brought it in when we had the in-house mail solution and certain users were getting 300 to 400 spam emails a day. That was just a huge burden. Almost instantly, SpamTitan cut that down by well over 90%, even with the out-of-the-box tuning. That was a huge savings.

Even after we migrated to a cloud-hosted mail solution through Microsoft, it gives us that design goal of not trusting just one vendor's product for security.

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment was very easy. Basically, we just changed our MX records, and a minute or two later, it was working. It was very easy to deploy. 

It was very important to us that the setup and configuration were easy. Being a small school, we don't have a big staff for things like this. At the time that we brought it in, there was just one other person (a technician) and me. 

When there is a full range of IT services that we need to offer, I can't have a product that ties us up too much. So, SpamTitan has been easy to work with.

What about the implementation team?

The SpamTitan team just walked us through it. There wasn't much to it because it was easy to work with.

What was our ROI?

Our ROI is excellent. Technically, we don't have to have it. Microsoft does an excellent job, but SpamTitan is so inexpensive that it is worth having that extra layer of defense. We just get a lot of peace of mind from having it.

We have considered dropping SpamTitan just to save little money on the budget. However, we thought through the cost of having a breach coming through email. There are certainly other attack avenues, but as far as email goes, SpamTitan is a bargain. It is using a different build entity than Microsoft uses, and I like having less of a monoculture when it comes to security.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing and licensing have been very fair. I can't complain.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Because we are a small school, the cost is an issue for us. SpamTitan was much more affordable than some of the other solutions.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, it is a great product. It is simple. It just does what it is supposed to do. We just haven't had issues with it.

Every now and then, I check and see if we have a false positive or add some geo-filtering. I will use the edge filtering at times, but I wouldn't call that maintenance. I will add exceptions if we bring on a new partner, then I will make sure that their stuff is whitelisted.

I would rate SpamTitan as 9.5 out of 10. I am just going to take off half a point for the performance issues at times. Not all the time, but sometimes when I am setting up filters to try to sort through the spam in the quarantine. Sometimes that gets a little bit pokey, but honestly, it has better performance than what I get out of Microsoft.

If you are looking for something where this solution is the first thing that scans your mail before it even goes through your mail server, then it is an outstanding option. I would highly recommend it with no reservations.

We really do love SpamTitan. It just works. It is simple, and I don't have to think about it. 

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Rick Shepard - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at RCI Systems
Real User
Users can customize the emails they get and the emails they block, saving me time
Pros and Cons
  • "It gives our users the chance to interact with the program. They can decide if there are things that are junk mail that they don't want to be messing with, on an individual basis. Of course, I can always override that or control it from a company standpoint."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use it for spam filtering.

    How has it helped my organization?

    The fact that you're able to customize the program on an individual basis has been very helpful. That means I don't have to get involved with blocking certain things unless they are a common denominator among all our employees. If something keeps showing up, I'll get several requests to block it company-wide. Otherwise, the users can get in there and do their own thing and I don't have to worry about it.

    It has definitely saved employees' time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. We've turned it off a few times because we were having some issues or we had to change our mail server and, all of a sudden, people would say, "I got 50 spam messages." SpamTitan is definitely doing its job. It is probably 20 to 25 percent more effective than our previous solution.

    SpamTitan is catching a little more than SonicWall did. It's about 10 to 15 percent more effective in that aspect. And the fact that it's a little more customizable has certainly made it a better solution.

    It has also reduced our false positive rate by that same 10 to 15 percent. Nothing is perfect. You're always going to have a few that get through or that get blocked when you don't want them blocked. You just have to watch it and teach it. The longer we've been using it, the more refined we've been able to get it.

    What is most valuable?

    It gives our users the chance to interact with the program. They can decide if there are things that are junk mail that they don't want to be messing with, on an individual basis. Of course, I can always override that or control it from a company standpoint.

    We use the geo-blocking feature to block a few countries, but for the most part, we leave most of them open. We deal with manufacturers that have office locations and factories in many countries, including Russia and China. But we'll block something like Afghanistan because we're not getting any business from Afghanistan. The geo-blocking may not have reduced our spam significantly, but it does block some.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I've been using TitanHQ SpamTitan for just about a year.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    It's extremely stable. We've never had a failure such as their servers going down or anything like that.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    It's probably very scalable for a larger company. I really only know it from our small company standpoint, but it would appear that it would work for a company of tens of thousands.

    How are customer service and support?

    We changed to a new mail server and we had some issues getting SpamTitan working on the new one, from a traffic standpoint, IP-wise. It wound up being a port that we needed to open up that wasn't open. I went back and forth a couple of times before we finally figured out what the problem was, but once it was fixed it worked fine.

    The engineer I was working with was obviously very knowledgeable and thorough, but he was probably used to dealing with IT people who deal with this stuff a lot more frequently and spend a lot more time with it than I do. Sometimes, they need to dumb it down a little bit and talk to their audience. They shouldn't assume that everyone is a subject matter expert.

    My experience with SonicWall's support was pretty similar, although I've had fewer problems to deal with using SpamTitan than I did with SonicWall.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We were having problems with spam. We were using SonicWall and they had issues with a release that they brought out last summer. It wouldn't work with our server and software combination. They tried and tried and then I got tired of waiting for them to fix it. I went hunting, came across SpamTitan, and it seemed like a good fit. We've been using it since then.

    With SpamTitan, our users have more access to their spam email than they were used to. We were limited with SonicWall. If you didn't get to your spam within three days, it was gone and you couldn't figure out what you missed. If you were on vacation, sometimes that would be a problem. SpamTitan doesn't have that problem as it can store stuff for a longer period of time. I believe it holds emails for 30 days. I can change that as an administrator, but I also have to be aware of the amount of junk mail that people get. Spam can really fill up a server pretty quickly, so you don't want to keep it around too long.

    A frequent problem with SonicWall, because of that three-day limit, was that once a user had passed that, I had to get involved. If a customer wrote to one of our employees saying, "Hey, did you get my email?" I'd have to go find it. I don't have that same problem anymore. It has been greatly reduced.

    In terms of the amount of time required to sort through unwanted junk and spam emails, SonicWall and SpamTitan are similar. You still have to go through your email and see which ones are junk. SpamTitan might be a little quicker because of how often it reports back.

    SpamTitan is also an improvement over the SonicWall solution from a filtering standpoint. It is a win-win. In some ways, it was nice SonicWall did fail because we have a better solution now.

    How was the initial setup?

    We had to disable the SonicWall version, which wasn't hard to do. Then we had to insert SpamTitan into the picture. It took a little bit of time, but not that much. It isn't something I do every day. I'm not an IT guy who deals with that on a regular basis.

    It was pretty much straightforward, with a couple of minor issues. We couldn't get it to work and it turns out we had some bad IP numbers. They had given us an older version from the demo and they said, "Oh, we should have given you new ones when you bought the product." That was a minor glitch. Their support was good over the phone and they got me pointed in the right direction and it's been working since.

    We discussed hosting SpamTitan in-house, because we had SonicWall in-house, but in this case the cloud solution seemed to be a better fit for us.

    It requires very little maintenance. In the early stages it was more because we were refining the program and what it was filtering and not filtering. Now, there are probably weeks that I don't even look at it. There are times when I'll get a comment from one of our users who says, "Hey, can you do this?" or "I'm having a problem," and I might look at it then. But if I spend 15 minutes on it in a week, that's a lot of time, at this point.

    What was our ROI?

    We do see a return on our investment. It's not a lot of money, but we do get some return because people aren't wasting their time with junk mail and I'm not wasting my time trying to filter out more things because users are able to do that on their own.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    One user is the same price as 50 users and there isn't a discount until you get to about 500 users. From a small business point of view—we're 30 people—there should be a price break before you have 500 people. Small businesses don't have a lot of money.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    I looked around on the internet. There wasn't a particular solution I was looking at. I read a review about SpamTitan and that's the one I remembered. I liked what I read, it seemed pretty straightforward, and that's what we went with.

    I looked at Proofpoint and a few other things, but a lot of them are designed for companies that are very large or at least medium sized. We're a small company and I wasn't going to spend tens of thousands of dollars. We don't have that in our budget for spam filtering, and SpamTitan was a lot more affordable.

    What other advice do I have?

    We really haven't been looking at anything else, because we've been happy with the product. I like it and we're up for renewal and we will be renewing it. You're not going to renew it if you don't like it.

    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
    PeerSpot user
    IT Manager at Supreme PLC
    Real User
    Reduces our administrative and security burden because it deals with threats before they can even get into our network
    Pros and Cons
    • "SpamTitan is highly scalable. You can add as many clustered servers as you require. If you find that your cluster is under a heavy load, it's simple to get SpamTitan to add other clusters to your environment. If we doubled in staff, our current solution has more than enough capacity to cope, but we're not planning on changing our usage at this time."
    • "Specifying your own filtering rules can be somewhat tricky. You can leave it alone or add your own filter rules using regular expressions. It would be nice to get a little more help configuring the regular expressions. That is quite complicated, and it's something I struggled with."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use SpamTitan as our preliminary filter for all inbound emails.

    How has it helped my organization?

    After implementing SpamTitan, we're less bothered by irrelevant spam messages and less concerned about viruses and macro-enabled files getting through because the rules are configured to stop them. It eases security headaches while improving the user experience because there's less spam. SpamTitan also reduces the administrative and security burden because it deals with threats before they can even get into our network. 

    About 37 percent of our inbound email is clean, and SpamTitan blocks the remaining 63 percent. That gives some idea of how much junk it cuts out. The solution has improved our spam catch rate while reducing false positives. It has saved us substantial time and hassles sifting through that. 

    I joined this company five years ago, and SpamTitan was one of the first solutions I installed. Inbound spam dropped by 95 percent. Some still get through, obviously. You have to draw a fine line because you don't want to block valid emails. Instead of locking it all the way down, we lock it down as much as possible. In the end, people have to put up with a few spam emails rather than missing valid emails that might have been blocked.

    What is most valuable?

    The user interface is intuitive and straightforward. All the functions are self-evident from the titles on the menus. They're crystal clear, and the in-application help is handy.

    What needs improvement?

    Specifying your own filtering rules can be somewhat tricky. You can leave it alone or add your own filter rules using regular expressions. It would be nice to get a little more help configuring the regular expressions. That is quite complicated, and it's something I struggled with. 

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I've been using SpamTitan for about seven or eight years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    Stability has never been an issue. I've been using it for seven years in total. I've only had one problem, and that was my fault for not following the correct procedures during a system update. I opened a ticket with TitanHQ support, and they fixed it in about 30 minutes.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    SpamTitan is highly scalable. You can add as many clustered servers as you require. If you find that your cluster is under a heavy load, it's simple to get SpamTitan to add other clusters to your environment. If we doubled in staff, our current solution has more than enough capacity to cope, but we're not planning on changing our usage at this time.  

    We have roughly 250 users, including everybody from the CEO to warehouse workers. They don't use the program directly, but they benefit from having their email filtered. 

    How are customer service and support?

    TitanHQ support is absolutely brilliant, a perfect 10 out of 10. In addition to SpamTitan, we also use WebTitan, their cloud-based web filtering solution. I've had to contact support maybe two or three times in the past five years. On each occasion, communication and rectification of the issue have been outstanding. They're on it.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    I have used other products, but it's been a while. We previously used Mimecast, and it was also an excellent solution but considerably more expensive. Both solutions are stable and have great support. 

    How was the initial setup?

    Setting up SpamTitan is effortless. We got TitanHQ to set up a private cloud for us. Once the server was live, it was just a matter of reconfiguring my DNS MX records to route all inbound emails through SpamTitan. After that, I configured SpamTitan to route inbound emails to our Office 365 environment. It literally took me 20 minutes to get it running.

    We had zero problems setting up and configuring SpamTitan. We didn't need to contact support. It runs out of the box. You only need to do some configuration to customize it for your use case. Total deployment time was about three to four weeks from the initial purchase order to going live. 

    After the setup, one person is more than enough to maintain SpamTitan. We don't have a dedicated person for the solution because it needs little input. Once it's set up, it just runs. It's a fantastic product.

    What about the implementation team?

    I did the installation myself because I've used it before. We purchased it directly through TitanHQ. The initial setup was perfectly straightforward, and I did the fine tweaking myself over a period of time.

    What was our ROI?

    We've seen a 95 percent reduction in inbound spam and an equivalent reduction in inbound, malicious, phishing emails, and virus emails. You can't get a better return on investment than improving your security.

    What other advice do I have?

    I rate SpamTitan 10 out of 10. It's a great option if you are looking for an efficient, reliable, easy-to-use email filtering solution that doesn't require onsite IT people to maintain. You don't need a technical understanding of email protocols and security to use it.

    My advice is to look at the pros and cons of all the email filtering solutions and pick one that best fits your budget and security requirements. I can't say that SpamTitan is the right solution for everybody, but it's certainly perfect for us. I'm extremely happy with it and have been for years. It does what it says on the tin. SpamTitan is reasonably priced, and TitanHQ 's tech support is excellent. I can't speak highly enough of those guys.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    Private Cloud
    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
    PeerSpot user
    Harvey Hochkievich - PeerSpot reviewer
    Directory of IT at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
    Real User
    Huge reduction in spam, easy to use, and good and steady price
    Pros and Cons
    • "I like its ease of use. As director of IT, I'm often in contact with our staff to make sure that they're safe and secure in their usage of email, etc. The quarantine features in SpamTitan make it really easy for them to review messages that haven't come in, and the rating of the score helps them determine whether or not they want to look at them at all. So, I see the quarantine feature as one of the best things in SpamTitan."
    • "There is no plugin for Outlook, which might be of an advantage so that you can just click on a link in Outlook that takes you right to your quarantine list. It doesn't have that at the moment."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use it in front of Office 365. We have 365 in the cloud. We use SpamTitan in front of it as a filter to make sure we don't lose anything in our protection, or our onion. It's just one more slice of the skin.

    How has it helped my organization?

    It has been a long time, but I know that they did some benchmarking back when it was put in. My understanding is that it has improved the blocking of spam by 50% to 60% from when we were relying on other products to do that. I wasn't here when they implemented it, but looking back at some of the old notes, there has been an improvement of 50% to 60% of less spam coming through. That is huge. This 50% to 60% reduction in emails certainly makes a big difference.

    It has definitely saved employees time by not having to sort through junk and spam emails. The daily report that lets them pick and choose what they would like to pull through is much easier than having to go through the whole list of emails, etc. They don't worry about it much. They look at that report, and they determine what's worth taking out of it. It's not very often that they pull anything out of it. It's a quick look, and you're done, rather than scrolling through 20, 30, or 100 emails that would've got through and you have to sort them out. It's definitely a time saver.

    I know it only takes them seconds to go through the SpamTitan list, review it, and just delete the SpamTitan email. I know it's not taking a lot of their time just from looking at my own report. On a daily basis, I get a report that shows 60 to 100 emails that were blocked by SpamTitan, and I know I don't have to go through those. I just need to have a quick look. The only thing I do is to look for stuff that I was expecting that got caught by SpamTitan, but that doesn't happen very often. It's a huge time saver from that perspective.

    We get maybe one or two calls a week, maybe in false positives, where SpamTitan caught something that should have gone through. One or two false positives in a week are excellent. That just means my team doesn't have to worry too much.

    What is most valuable?

    I like its ease of use. As director of IT, I'm often in contact with our staff to make sure that they're safe and secure in their usage of email, etc. The quarantine features in SpamTitan make it really easy for them to review messages that haven't come in, and the rating of the score helps them determine whether or not they want to look at them at all. So, I see the quarantine feature as one of the best things in SpamTitan.

    There is ease of use for the individuals who are accessing it. It doesn't require a lot of training. It's intuitive. You can see what you need to see. They get their daily reports so they know what they're looking at. If they're missing something they were expecting to come in, they can contact the help desk, and we can take care of that for them. It's easy for my team to find things. The filtering setup on it is quite good.

    What needs improvement?

    I personally haven't gone through SpamTitan enough. I don't necessarily need the reporting features and whatnot. There are a lot of things that might be of value, but at this point in time, I don't use them. If there was a way to increase the frequency of the daily report, that would be helpful. Somehow I thought that it was just a setting. If it's not a setting that I can change, it would definitely be helpful to have that come two times a day: one during the day at one o'clock or two o'clock in the afternoon and one overnight. If they could adjust the frequency of the reporting so that I could have it two times a day, that would be helpful.

    There is no plugin for Outlook, which might be of an advantage so that you can just click on a link in Outlook that takes you right to your quarantine list. It doesn't have that at the moment.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I have been using this solution for about five or six years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    It has been extremely reliable. We haven't had any outages or downtime with them. I can't remember anything in recent memory. In the last year or so, we haven't had any outages. We haven't had any problems. Our team has had a few questions about configuration, and they were responded to very quickly. It's very reliable. It's always on, and it just works.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    We haven't had to change it a whole lot. I don't know for sure, but my understanding is that it's very flexible. I get a call from our sales rep, and we walk through the options and determine whether or not we're going to change. One of the questions I have is whether we need to change the number of access points, and the answer has been no for the last couple of years. So, I assume they scale quite well, but I don't know for sure. It didn't seem to be an issue from their side anyway.

    In terms of its usage, we have a single location. We're a manufacturing company. We have one location, and it's deployed across the network here. I have roughly 143 users, and I have two admins to manage that. It reduces the effort on part of my admin team, but it also reduces the effort on part of the users themselves.

    How are customer service and support?

    My team has had the occasional reason to call them up when they weren't sure of a setting that they needed to change. The response has been quick. It has been easy, and they've met all our time frames in terms of responding. So, we've been happy with it.

    I would rate their tech support a ten out of ten. They're very responsive. They're very quick, and the answers are succinct. There are no issues.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    How was the initial setup?

    My team didn't have any trouble implementing it and getting it running quickly with the cloud team. Originally, it was on-premises, and we went to the cloud three years ago. The switchover and implementation were great. There were no issues, problems, or hiccups.

    Its maintenance is very lightweight. It runs in the background. We don't have to worry about it. We haven't had any issues with failures, outages, or anything. It has been excellent.

    What was our ROI?

    What I pay for it in the year, I definitely recoup all of that in the time saved for my team and the users in terms of not having to deal with problems.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    Its pricing is good. We've been happy with the pricing. I know that they did some extensive research, and the pricing was quite favorable with everything else that they looked at. My budget hasn't changed a whole lot over the last three to five years. It's nice to see that it has remained pretty steady. So, I am happy with the pricing. It provides good value for money.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    My team here did a pretty good job comparing two other options against this particular option, and SpamTitan was head and shoulders better.

    What other advice do I have?

    I would advise doing a good comparison with other mail filters. Do your due diligence and take a look at the other options and list both sides of the equation. You'll find that SpamTitan is better than whatever else you're looking at.

    SpamTitan has a lot of nice features, but we haven't got to utilize all of them. We haven't used the geo-blocking feature. We've thought about turning it on, but we don't use it at the moment, and that's just a matter of we haven't gotten to it yet. Similarly, we haven't yet used ArcTitan or EncryptTitan. We're pretty much using the basic version of SpamTitan. We'll be looking at all of the options for SpamTitan as we move forward.

    I would rate it a nine out of ten because I don't know all the options. I haven't utilized all of what we could. I haven't explored the rest of it, but I would highly recommend it. I have no problem recommending the product. I know it works quite well. It functions, it works, and I don't have to think about it much.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    Public Cloud
    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
    PeerSpot user
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free TitanHQ SpamTitan Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
    Updated: January 2025
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free TitanHQ SpamTitan Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.